The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the
Middle Ages and Modern Times
The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Development of the Feeling for Nature in
the Middle Ages and Modern Times, by Alfred Biese
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may
copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or
online at www.gutenberg.net
Title: The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and Modern Times
Author: Alfred Biese
Release Date: October 20, 2004 [eBook #13814]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE FEELING FOR
NATURE IN THE MIDDLE AGES AND MODERN TIMES***
E-text prepared by Jonathan Ingram, Leonard Johnson, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed
Proofreading Team
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE FEELING FOR NATURE IN THE MIDDLE AGES AND MODERN
TIMES
by
ALFRED BIESE
Director of the K. K. Gymnasium at Neuwied
Authorized translation from the German
1905
AUTHOR'S PREFACE
The encouraging reception of my "Development of the Feeling for Nature among the Greeks and Romans"
gradually decided me, after some years, to carry the subject on to modern tunes. Enticing as it was, I did not
shut my eyes to the great difficulties of a task whose dimensions have daunted many a savant since the days of
Humboldt's clever, terse sketches of the feeling for Nature in different times and peoples. But the subject,
once approached, would not let me go. Its solution seemed only possible from the side of historical
development, not from that of a priori synthesis. The almost inexhaustible amount of material, especially
towards modern times, has often obliged me to limit myself to typical forerunners of the various epochs,

Edgehill, Miss Tomlinson, and Dr B. Scheifers for translations from Greek and Latin, Italian, and Middle
German respectively.
INTRODUCTION
Nature in her ever-constant, ever-changing phases is indispensable to man, his whole existence depends upon
her, and she influences him in manifold ways, in mind as well as body.
The physical character of a country is reflected in its inhabitants; the one factor of climate alone gives a very
different outlook to northerner and southerner. But whereas primitive man, to whom the darkness of night
meant anxiety, either feared Nature or worshipped her with awe, civilised man tries to lift her veil, and
through science and art to understand her inner and outer beauty the scientist in her laws, the man of religion
in her relation to his Creator, the artist in reproducing the impressions she makes upon him.
The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and Modern Times 2
Probably it has always been common to healthy minds to take some pleasure in her; but it needs no slight
culture of heart and mind to grasp her meaning and make it clear to others. Her book lies open before us, but
the interpretations have been many and dissimilar. A fine statue or a richly-coloured picture appeals to all, but
only knowledge can appreciate it at its true value and discover the full meaning of the artist. And as with Art,
so with Nature.
For Nature is the greatest artist, though dumb until man, with his inexplicable power of putting himself in her
place, transferring to her his bodily and mental self, gives her speech.
Goethe said 'man never understands how anthropomorphic he is.' No study, however comprehensive, enables
him to overstep human limits, or conceive a concrete being, even the highest, from a wholly impersonal point
of view. His own self always remains an encumbering factor. In a real sense he only understands himself, and
his measure for all things is man. To understand the world outside him, he must needs ascribe his own
attributes to it, must lend his own being to find it again.
This unexplained faculty, or rather inherent necessity, which implies at once a power and a limit, extends to
persons as well as things. The significant word sympathy expresses it. To feel a friend's grief is to put oneself
in his place, think from his standpoint and in his mood that is, suffer with him. The fear and sympathy which
condition the action of tragedy depend upon the same mental process; one's own point of view is shifted to
that of another, and when the two are in harmony, and only then, the claim of beauty is satisfied, and æsthetic
pleasure results.
By the well-known expression of Greek philosophy, 'like is only understood by like,' the Pythagoreans meant

followed Orpheus with his lute. Scientific knowledge, optical, acoustical, meteorological, geological, only
widens and deepens love for her and increases and refines the sense of her beauty. In short, deep feeling for
Nature always proves considerable culture of heart and mind.
There is a constant analogy between the growth of this feeling and that of general culture.
As each nation and time has its own mode of thought, which is constantly changing, so each period has its
'landscape eye.' The same rule applies to individuals. Nature, as Jean Paul said, is made intelligible to man in
being for ever made flesh. We cannot look at her impersonally, we must needs give her form and soul, in
order to grasp and describe her.
Vischer says[1] 'it is simply by an act of comparison that we think we see our own life in inanimate objects.'
We say that Nature's clearness is like clearness of mind, that her darkness and gloom are like a dark and
gloomy mood; then, omitting 'like,' we go on to ascribe our qualities directly to her, and say, this
neighbourhood, this air, this general tone of colour, is cheerful, melancholy, and so forth. Here we are
prompted by an undeveloped dormant consciousness which really only compares, while it seems to take one
thing for another. In this way we come to say that a rock projects boldly, that fire rages furiously over a
building, that a summer evening with flocks going home at sunset is peaceful and idyllic; that autumn,
dripping with rain, its willows sighing in the wind, is elegiac and melancholy and so forth.
Perhaps Nature would not prove to be this ready symbol of man's inner life were there no secret rapport
between the two. It is as if, in some mysterious way, we meet in her another mind, which speaks a language
we know, wakening a foretaste of kinship; and whether the soul she expresses is one we have lent her, or her
own which we have divined, the relationship is still one of give and take.
Let us take a rapid survey of the course of this feeling in antiquity. Pantheism has always been the home of a
special tenderness for Nature, and the poetry of India is full of intimate dealings between man and plants and
animals.
They are found in the loftiest flights of religious enthusiasm in the Vedas, where, be it only in reference to the
splendour of dawn or the 'golden-handed sun,' Nature is always assumed to be closely connected with man's
inner and outer life. Later on, as Brahminism appeared, deepening the contemplative side of Hindoo character,
and the drama and historical plays came in, generalities gave way to definite localizing, and in the Epics
ornate descriptions of actual landscape took independent place. Nature's sympathy with human joys and griefs
was taken for granted, and she played a part of her own in drama.
In the _Mahâbhârata_, when Damajanti is wandering in search of her lost Nala and sees the great mountain

undulating gait.
Then he sees a creeper without flowers, and a strange attraction impels him to embrace it, for its likeness to
his lost love:
Vine of the wilderness, behold A lone heartbroken wretch in me, Who dreams in his embrace to fold His love,
as wild he clings to thee.
Thereupon the creeper transforms itself into Urwasi.
In Kalidasa's Sakuntala, too, when the pretty girls are watering the flowers in the garden, Sakuntala says: 'It is
not only in obedience to our father that I thus employ myself. I really feel the affection of a sister for these
young plants.' Taking it for granted that the mango tree has the same feeling for herself, she cries: 'Yon Amra
tree, my friends, points with the fingers of its leaves, which the gale gently agitates, and seems inclined to
whisper some secret'; and with maiden shyness, attributing her own thoughts about love to the plants, one of
her comrades says: 'See, my Sakuntala, how yon fresh Mallica which you have surnamed Vanadosini or
Delight of the Grove, has chosen the sweet Amra for her bridegroom '
'How charming is the season, when the nuptials even of plants are thus publicly celebrated!' and elsewhere:
The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and Modern Times 5
'Here is a plant, Sakuntala, which you have forgotten.' Sakuntala: 'Then I shall forget myself.'
Birds,[2] clouds, and waves are messengers of love; all Nature grieves at the separation of lovers. When
Sakuntala is leaving her forest, one of her friends says: 'Mark the affliction of the forest itself when the time of
your departure approaches!
'The female antelope browses no more on the collected Cusa grass, and the pea-hen ceases to dance on the
lawn; the very plants of the grove, whose pale leaves fall on the ground, lose their strength and their beauty.'
The poems of India, especially those devoted to descriptions of Nature, abound in such bold, picturesque
personifications, which are touching, despite their extravagance, through their intense sympathy with Nature.
They shew the Hindoo attitude toward Nature in general, as well as his boundless fancy. I select one example
from 'The Gathering of the Seasons' in Kalidasa's _Ritusanhare_: a description of the Rains.
'Pouring rain in torrents at the request of the thirst-stricken Chatakas, and emitting slow mutterings pleasing to
the ears, clouds, bent down by the weight of their watery contents, are slowly moving on
'The rivers being filled up with the muddy water of the rivers, their force is increased. Therefore, felling down
the trees on both the banks, they, like unchaste women, are going quickly towards the ocean
'The heat of the forest has been removed by the sprinkling of new water, and the Ketaka flowers have

'The sea saw it, and fled: Jordan was driven back. The mountains skipped like rams, and the little hills like
lambs.' Psalm 114.
'The waters saw thee, O God, the waters saw thee; they were afraid: the depths also were troubled.' Psalm 77.
All these lofty personifications of inanimate Nature only characterise her in her relation to another, and that
not man but God. Nothing had significance by itself, Nature was but a book in which to read of Jehovah; and
for this reason the Hebrew could not be wrapt in her, could not seek her for her own sake, she was only a
revelation of the Deity.
'Lord, how great are thy works, in wisdom hast thou made them all: the earth is full of thy goodness.'
Yet there is a fiery glow of enthusiasm in the songs in praise of Jehovah's wonders in creation.
'0 Lord my God, thou art very great; thou art clothed with honour and majesty.
'Who coverest thyself with light as with a garment; who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain.
'Who layeth the beams of his chambers in the waters; who maketh the clouds his chariot; who walketh upon
the wings of the wind.
'Who maketh his angels spirits; his ministers a flaming fire; who laid the foundations of the earth, that it
should not be removed for ever.
'Thou coveredst the deep as with a garment; the waters stood above the mountains.
'At thy rebuke they fled; at the voice of thy thunder they hasted away.
'They go up by the mountains; they go down by the valleys unto the place which thou hast founded for them.
'Thou hast set a bound that they may not pass over; that they turn not again to cover the earth.
'He sendeth the springs into the valleys, which run among the hills.
'They give drink to every beast of the field: the wild asses quench their thirst.
'By them shall the fowls of the heaven have their habitation, which sing among the branches
'He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for the service of man: that he may bring forth food out
of the earth.
'And wine that maketh glad the heart of man
The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and Modern Times 7
'The trees of the Lord are full of sap; the cedars of Lebanon, which he hath planted.
'Where the birds make their nests: as for the stork, the fir trees are her house.
'The high hills are a refuge for the wild goats, and the rocks for the conies.
'He appointed the moon for seasons: the sun knoweth his going down.

The Cosmos unfolded itself to the Hebrew[3] as one great whole, and the glance fixed upon a distant horizon
missed the nearer lying detail of phenomena. His imagination ranged the universe with the wings of the wind,
and took vivid note of air, sky, sea, and land, but only, so to speak, in passing; it never rested there, but
hurried past the boundaries of earth to Jehovah's throne, and from that height looked down upon creation.
The attitude of the Greek was very different. Standing firmly rooted in the world of sense, his open mind and
his marvellous eye for beauty appreciated the glorious external world around him down to its finest detail. His
was the race of the beautiful, the first in history to train all its powers into harmony to produce a culture of
beauty equal in form and contents, and his unique achievement in art and science enriched all after times with
lasting standards of the great and beautiful.
The influence of classic literature upon the Middle Ages and modern times has not only endured, but has gone
on increasing with the centuries; so that we must know the position reached by Greece and Rome as to feeling
for Nature, in order to discover whether the line of advance in the Middle Ages led directly forward or began
by a backward movement a zigzag.
The terms ancient and modern, naive and sentimental, classic and romantic, have been shibboleths of culture
from Jean Paul, Schiller, and Hegel, to Vischer. Jean Paul, in his Vorschule zur Aesthetik, compares the
ideally simple Greek poetry, with its objectivity, serenity, and moral grace, with the musical poetry of the
romantic period, and speaks of one as the sunlight that pervades our waking hours, the other as the moonlight
that gleams fitfully on our dreaming ones. Schiller's epoch-making essay On Naive and Sentimental Poetry,
with its rough division into the classic-naive depending on a harmony between nature and mind, and the
modern-sentimental depending on a longing for a lost paradise, is constantly quoted to shew that the Greeks
took no pleasure in Nature. This is misleading. Schiller's Greek was very limited; in the very year (1795) in
which the essay appeared in The Hours, he was asking Humboldt's advice as to learning Greek, with special
reference to Homer and Xenophon.
To him Homer was the Greek par excellence, and who would not agree with him to-day?
As in Greek mythology, that naive poem of Nature, the product of the artistic impulse of the race to stamp its
impressions in a beautiful and harmonious form, so in the clear-cut comparisons in Homer, the feeling for
Nature is profound; but the Homeric hero had no personal relations with her, no conscious leaning towards
her; the descriptions only served to frame human action, in time or space.
But that cheerful, unreflecting youth of mankind, that naive Homeric time, was short in spite of Schiller, who,
in the very essay referred to, included Euripides, Virgil, and Horace among the sentimental, and Shakespeare

beliefs. Subjectivity had already gained in strength from the birth of the lyric, that most individual of all
expressions of feeling; and since the lyric cannot dispense with the external world, classic song now shewed
the tender subjective feeling for Nature which we see in Sappho, Pindar, and Simonides. Yet Euripides (and
Aristophanes, whose painful mad laugh, as Doysen says, expresses the same distraction and despair as the
deep melancholy of Euripides) only paved the way for that sentimental, idyllic feeling for Nature which dwelt
on her quiet charms for their own sake, as in Theocritus, and, like the modern, rose to greater intensity in the
presence of the amorous passion, as we see in Kallimachos and the Anthology. It was the outcome of
Hellenism, of which sentimental introspection, the freeing of the ego from the bonds of race and position, and
the discovery of the individual in all directions of human existence, were marks. And this feeling developing
from Homer to Longos, from unreflecting to conscious and then to sentimental pleasure in Nature, was
expressed not only in poetry but in painting, although the latter never fully mastered technique.
The common thoughtless statement, so often supported by quotations from Schiller, Gervinus, and others, that
Greek antiquity was not alive to the beauty of Nature and her responsiveness to human moods, and neither
painted scenery nor felt the melancholy poetic charm of ruins and tombs, is therefore a perversion of the truth;
but it must be conceded that the feeling which existed then was but the germ of our modern one. It was
fettered by the specific national beliefs concerning the world and deities, by the undeveloped state of the
natural sciences, which, except botany, still lay in swaddling-clothes, by the new influence of Christendom,
and by that strict feeling for style which, very much to its advantage, imposed a moderation that would have
excluded much of our senseless modern rhapsody.
It was not unnatural that Schiller, in distaste for the weak riot of feeling and the passion for describing Nature
which obtained in his day, was led to overpraise the Homeric naïvete and overblame the sentimentality which
he wrongly identified with it.
In all that is called art, the Romans were pupils of the Greek, and their achievements in the region of beauty
cannot be compared with his. But they advanced the course of general culture, and their feeling always more
subjective, abstract, self-conscious, and reflective has a comparatively familiar, because modern, ring in the
great poets.
The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and Modern Times 10
The preference for the practical and social-economic is traceable in their feeling for Nature. Their mythology
also lay too much within the bounds of the intelligible; shewed itself too much in forms and ceremonies, in a
cult; but it had not lost the sense of awe it still heard the voices of mysterious powers in the depths of the

The dangers and hardships of those days must have put enjoyment out of the question; and only served to
heighten the unfavourable contrast between the wildness of the mountain regions and the cultivation of Italy.
Lucretius looked at wild scenery with horror, but later on it became a favourite subject for description; and
Seneca notes, as shewing a morbid state of mind, in his essay on tranquillity of mind, that travelling not only
attracts men to delightful places, but that some even exclaim: 'Let us go now into Campania; now that delicate
soil delighteth us, let us visit the wood countries, let us visit the forest of Calabria, and let us seek some
pleasure amidst the deserts, in such sort as these wandering eyes of ours may be relieved in beholding, at our
pleasure, the strange solitude of these savage places.'
The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and Modern Times 11
We have thus briefly surveyed on the one hand, in theory, the conditions under which a conscious feeling for
Nature develops, and the forms in which it expresses itself; and, on the other, the course this feeling has
followed in antiquity among the Hindoos, Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans. The movement toward the modern,
toward the subjective and individual, lies clear to view. We will now trace its gradual development along lines
which are always strictly analogous to those of culture in general, through the Middle Ages.
CHAPTER I
CHRISTIANITY AND GERMANISM
When the heathen world had outlived its faculties, and its creative power had failed, it sank into the ocean of
the past a sphinx, with her riddle guessed, and mediæval civilization arose, founded upon Christianity and
Germanism. There are times in the world's history when change seems to be abrupt, the old to be swept away
and all things made new at a stroke, as if by the world-consuming fire of the old Saga. But, in reality, all
change is gradual; the old is for ever failing and passing out of sight, to be taken up as a ferment into the ever
emerging new, which changes and remodels as it will. It was so with Christianity. It is easy to imagine that it
arose suddenly, like a phoenix, from the ashes of heathendom; but, although dependent at heart upon the
sublime personality of its Founder, it was none the less a product of its age, and a result of gradual
development a river with sources partly in Judea, partly in Hellas. And mediæval Christianity never denied
the traces of its double origin.
Upon this syncretic soil its literature sprang up, moulded as to matter upon Old Testament and specifically
Christian models, as to form upon the great writers of antiquity; but matter and form are only separable in the
abstract, and the Middle Ages are woven through and through with both Greco-Roman and Jewish elements.
But these elements were unfavourable to the development of feeling for Nature; Judaism admitted no delight

merging of material in spiritual, this giving spirit the exclusive sway; and Christianity, while it broke down
the barriers of nation, race, and position, and widened the cleft between Nature and spirit, discovered at the
same time the worth of the individual.
And this individuality was one of the chief steps towards an artistic, that is, individual point of view about
Nature, for it was not possible to consider her freely and for her own sake alone, until the unlimited
independence of mind had been recognized.
But the full development of Christianity was only reached when it blended with the Germanic spirit, with the
German Gemüth (for which no other language has a word), and intensified, by so doing, the innately
subjective temperament of the race.
The northern climate gives pause for the development of the inner life; its long bleak winter, with the heavy
atmosphere and slow coming of spring, wake a craving for light and warmth, and throw man back on himself.
This inward inclination, which made itself felt very early in the German race, by bringing out the
contemplative and independent sides of his character, and so disinclining him for combined action with his
fellows, forwarded the growth of the over-ripe seeds of classic culture and vital Christianity.
The Romanic nations, with their brilliant, sharply-defined landscape and serene skies, always retained
something of the objective delight in life which belonged to antiquity; they never felt that mysterious impulse
towards dreams and enthusiastic longing which the Northerner draws from his lowering skies and dark woods,
his mists on level and height, the grey in grey of his atmosphere, and his ever varying landscape. A raw
climate drives man indoors in mind as well as body, and prompts that craving for spring and delight in its
coming which have been the chief notes in northern feeling for Nature from earliest times.
Vischer has shewn in his Aesthetik, that German feeling was early influenced by the different forms of plant
life around it. Rigid pine, delicate birch, stalwart oak, each had its effect; and the wildness and roughness of
land, sea, and animal life in the North combined with the cold of the climate to create the taste for domestic
comfort, for fireside dreams, and thought-weaving by the hearth.
Nature schooled the race to hard work and scanty pleasure, and yet its relationship to her was deep and
heartfelt from the first. Devoutly religious, it gazed at her with mingled love and fear; and the deposit of its
ideas about her was its mythology.
Its gods dwelt in mountain tops, holes in the rocks, and rivers, and especially in dark forests and in the leafy
boughs of sacred trees; and the howling of wind, the rustle of leaves, the soughing in the tree tops, were
sounds of their presence. The worship of woods lasted far into Christian times, especially among the Saxons

into birds. Two ravens, Hugin and Munin, whose names signify thought and memory, were Odin's constant
companions. The gift of prophecy was ascribed to the cuckoo, as its monotonous voice heralded the spring:
Kukuk vam haven, wo lange sail ik leven?
There were many legends of men and snakes who exchanged shapes, and whom it was unlucky to kill.[4]
The sun and moon, too, were familiar figures in legends.
Their movement across the sky was a flight from two pursuing wolves, of which one, the Fenris wolf, was
fated one day to catch and devour the moon. The German, like the Greek, dreaded nothing more than the
eclipse of sun or moon, and connected it with the destruction of all things and the end of the world. In the
moon spots he saw a human form carrying a hare or a stick or an axe on his shoulder.
The Solstices impressed him most of all, with their almost constant day in summer, almost constant night in
winter. Sun, moon, and stars were the eyes of heaven; there was a pious custom to greet the stars before going
to bed. Still earlier, they were sparks of fire from Muspilli, to light the gods home. Night, day, and the sun had
their cars night and day with one horse, the sun with two: sunrise brought sounds sweeter than the song of
birds or strings; the rising sun, it was said, rings for joy, murmuring daybreak laughs.[5]
CHAPTER I 14
Day brought joy, night sorrow; the first was good and friendly, the second bad and hostile. The birds greeted
daytime and summer with songs of delight, but grieved in silence through night and winter: the first swallow
and stork were hailed as spring's messengers. May with greening woods led in beloved summer, frost and
snow the winter.
So myth, fable, and legend were interlaced in confusion; who can separate the threads?
At any rate, the point of view which they indicate remained the common one even far into the Middle Ages,
and shewed simple familiar intercourse with Nature. Even legal formulæ were full of pictures from Nature. In
the customary oath to render a contract binding, the promise is to hold, so it runs, 'so long as the sun shines
and rivers flow, so long as the wind blows and birds sing, so far off as earth is green and fir trees grow, so far
as the vault of heaven reaches.' As Schnaase says,[6] though with some exaggeration, such formulæ, in their
summary survey of earth and sky, often give a complete landscape poem in a few words. He points out that in
northern, as opposed to classic mythology, Nature was considered, not in the cursory Hebrew way, that
hurried over or missed detail, but as a whole, and in her relation to man's inner life.
'The collective picture of heaven and earth, of cloud movement, of the mute life of plants that side of Nature
which had almost escaped the eye of antiquity occupied the Northerner most of all.

by legends, and by the worship of the Madonna and saints, but it has never been destroyed, and it keeps its
magic to the present day.
We see then that the inborn German feeling for Nature, conditioned by climate and landscape, and
pronounced in his mythology, found both an obstacle and a support in Christianity an obstacle in its
transcendentalism, and a support in its inwardness.
CHAPTER II
THE THEOLOGICAL CHRISTIAN AND THE SYMPATHETIC HEATHEN FEELING OF THE FIRST
TEN CENTURIES A.D.
The Middle Ages employed its best intellectual power in solving the problems of man's relation to God and
the Redeemer, his moral vocation, and his claim to the Kingdom of the blessed. Mind and heart were almost
entirely engrossed by the dogmas of the new faith, such as the incarnation, original sin, and free-will, and by
doubts which the Old Testament had raised and not solved. Life was looked upon as a test-place, a
thoroughfare to the heavenly Kingdom; earth, with its beauty and its appeal to the senses, as a temptress.
To flee the world and to lack artistic feeling were therefore marks of the period. We have no trace of scientific
knowledge applied to Nature, and she was treated with increasing contempt, as the influence of antiquity died
out. In spite of this, the attitude of the Apostolic Fathers was very far from hostile. Their fundamental idea
was the Psalmist's 'Lord, how great are Thy works; in wisdom hast Thou made them all!' and yet they turned
to Nature at any rate, the noblest Grecians among them not only for proof of divine wisdom and goodness,
but with a degree of personal inclination, an enthusiasm, to which antiquity was a stranger.
Clement of Rome wrote to the Corinthians:
'Let us note how free from anger He is towards all His creatures. The heavens are moved by His direction and
obey Him in peace. Day and night accomplish the course assigned to them by Him, without hindrance one to
another. The sun and the moon and the dancing stars, according to His appointment, circle in harmony within
the bounds assigned to them, without any swerving aside. The earth, bearing fruit in fulfilment of His will at
her proper seasons, putteth forth the food that supplieth abundantly both men and beasts and all living things
which are thereupon, making no dissension, neither altering anything which He hath decreed. Moreover, the
inscrutable depths of the abysses and unutterable statutes of the nether regions are constrained by the same
ordinances. The basin of the boundless sea, gathered together by His workmanship into its reservoirs, passeth
not the barriers wherewith it is surrounded; but even as He ordered it, so it doeth. For He said, "so far shalt
thou come, and thy waves shall be broken within thee." The ocean which is impassable for men, and the

sweetest of all fruits, tranquillity; not only because it is free from the noises of cities, but because it is not
traversed by a single visitor except the hunters, who occasionally join us. For, besides its other advantages, it
also produces animals not bears and wolves, like yours heaven forbid! But it feeds herds of stags, and of
wild goats and hares, and creatures of that kind. Do you not then observe what a narrow risk I ran, fool that I
was, to change such a spot for Tiberine, the depth of the habitable world? I am now hastening to it, pardon
me. For even Alcmæon, when he discovered the Echinades, no longer endured his wanderings.[3]
This highly-cultured prince of the Church clearly valued the place quite as much for its repose, its idyllic
solitude, for what we moderns would call its romantic surroundings, sylvan and rugged at once, as for its
fertility and practical uses. But it is too much to say, with Humboldt[4]:
In this simple description of scenery and forest life, feelings are expressed which are more intimately in
unison with those of modern tunes, than anything which has been transmitted to us from Greek or Roman
antiquity. From the lonely Alpine hut to which Basil withdrew, the eye wanders over the humid and leafy roof
of the forest below The poetic and mythical allusion at the close of the letter falls on the Christian ear like
an echo from another and earlier world.
The Hellenic poets of the Anthology, and the younger Pliny in Imperial days, held the same tone, elegiac and
idyllic[5]; as Villemain says, 'These pleasant pictures, these poetic allusions, do not shew the austerity of the
cloister.'[6] The specifically Christian and monastic was hidden by the purely human.
Other writings of Basil's express still more strongly the mild dejection which longs for solitude. For instance,
when Gregory had been dwelling upon the emptiness of all earthly things, he said in reply, that peace of soul
must be man's chief aim, and could only be attained by separation from the world, by solitude; 'for the
contemplation of Nature abates the fever of the soul, and banishes all insincerity and presumption.' Therefore
he loved the quiet corner where he was undisturbed by human intercourse.
He drew melancholy comparisons from Nature: men were compared to wandering clouds that dissolve into
nothing, to wavering shadows, and shipwrecked beings, etc.
His homilies on the Hexameron, too, shew thought of Nature. There is a fine sense for the play of colour on
the sea here: 'A pleasant sight is the glistening sea when a settled calm doth hold it; but pleasant too it is to
CHAPTER II 17
behold its surface ruffled by gentle breezes, and its colour now purple, now white, now dark; when it dasheth
not with violence against the neighbouring coast, but holdeth it in tranquil embrace.'[7]
There is enthusiastic admiration for Nature mixed with his profound religious feeling in the whole description

intercommunion.'
With the pathos of Job he cries:
Who has spread out the ground at my feet? Who has made the sky firm over me as a dome? Who carries the
sun as a torch before me? Who sends springs into the ravines? Who prepares the path of the waters?
And who gives my spirit the wing for that high flight in which I leave earth behind and hasten through the
wide ocean of air, know the beauty of the ether, and lift myself to the stars and observe all their splendour,
and, not staying there, but passing beyond the limits of mutable things, comprehend unchangeable Nature the
CHAPTER II 18
immutable Power which is based upon itself, and leads and supports all that exists?
This, with its markedly poetic swing, is surprisingly like the passage in Plato's _Phædo_, where Socrates says:
'If any man could arrive at the exterior limit or take the wings of a bird and come to the top, then, like a fish
who puts his head out of the water and sees this world, he would see a world beyond; and if the nature of man
could sustain the sight, he would acknowledge that this other world was the place of the true heaven and the
true light and the true earth.' But even the thought, that the order and splendour of Nature witnessed to the
eternal powers which had created her, was not strange to the Greek, as Aristotle proves in the remarks which
Cicero preserved to us in his treatise On the Nature of the Gods.
Well then did Aristotle observe: 'If there were men whose habitations had been always underground, in great
and commodious houses, adorned with statues and pictures, finished with everything which they who are
reputed happy abound with, and if, without stirring from thence, they should be informed of a certain divine
power and majesty, and after some time the earth should open, and they should quit their dark abode to come
to us, where they should immediately behold the earth, the seas, the heavens, should consider the vast extent
of the clouds and force of the winds, should see the sun, and observe his grandeur and beauty, and also his
generative power, inasmuch as day is occasioned by the diffusion of his light through the sky, and when night
has obscured the earth, they should contemplate the heavens bespangled and adorned with stars, the surprising
variety of the moon in her increase and wane, the rising and setting of all the stars and the inviolable
regularity of all their courses; when,' says he, 'they should see these things, they would undoubtedly conclude
that there are gods, and that these are their mighty works.'
Thus unconsciously the Greek Fathers of the Church took over the thoughts of the great classic philosophers,
only substituting a unity for a plurality of godhead. To soar upon the wings of bird, wind, or cloud, a motif
which we find here in Gregory of Nyssa, and which reached its finest expression in Ganymede and the

world, unless it be at one with God in self-forgetting devotion and surrender.
Solitude, to which all the deeper minds at this time paid homage, became the mother of new and great
thoughts, and of a view of the world little behind the modern in sentimentality.
What Villemain says of the quotation from Gregory Nazianzen just given, applies with equal force to the
others:
No doubt there is a singular charm in this mixture of abstract thoughts and emotions, this contrast between the
beauties of Nature and the unrest of a heart tormented by the enigma of existence and seeking to find rest in
faith It was not the poetry of Homer, it was another poetry It was in the new form of contemplative
poetry, in this sadness of man about himself, in these impulses towards God and the future, in this idealism so
little known by the poets of antiquity, that the Christian imagination could compete without disadvantage. It
was there that that poetry arose which modern satiety seeks for, the poetry of reverie and reflection, which
penetrates man's heart and deciphers his most intimate thoughts and vaguest wishes.
Contempt for art was a characteristic of the Fathers of the Church, and to that end they extolled Nature; man's
handiwork, however dazzling, was but vanity in their eyes, whereas Nature was the handiwork of the Creator.
Culture and Nature were purposely set in opposition to each other.[12] St Chrysostom wrote:
If the aspect of the colonnades of sumptuous buildings would lead thy spirit astray, look upwards to the vault
of heaven, and around thee on the open fields, in which herds graze by the water's side. Who does not despise
all the creations of art, when in the stillness of his soul he watches with admiration the rising of the sun, as it
pours its golden light over the face of the earth; when resting on the thick grass beside the murmuring spring,
or beneath the sombre shade of a thick and leafy tree, the eye rests on the far receding and hazy distance?
The visible to them was but a mirror of the invisible; as Paul says (13th of the 1st Corinthians): 'Here we see
in a glass darkly,' and Goethe: 'Everything transitory is but a similitude.'
God (says St Chrysostom again) has placed man in the world as in a royal palace gleaming with gold and
precious stones; but the wonderful thing about this palace is, that it is not made of stone, but of far costlier
material; he has not lighted up a golden candelabra, but given lights their fixed course in the roof of the
palace, where they are not only useful to us, but an object of great delight.[13]
The Roman secular writers of the first Christian centuries had not this depth of thought and sadness; but from
them too we have notable descriptions of Nature in which personal pleasure and sympathy are evident motives
as well as religious feeling.
In the little Octavius of Minucius Felix, a writing full of genuine human feeling of the time of Commodus, the

Lord, mortal. Remove all epithets, and then you will be sensible of His glory '
How like Faust's confession of faith to Gretchen:
Him who dare name And yet proclaim, Yes! I believe The All-embracer, All-sustainer, Doth he not
embrace, sustain, Thee, me, Himself? Lifts not the Heaven its dome above? Doth not the firm-set earth
beneath us rise? And beaming tenderly with looks of love Climb not the everlasting stars on high? Fill
thence thy heart, how large so e'er it be, And in the feeling when thou'rt wholly blest, Then call it what thou
wilt Bliss! Heart! Love! God! I have no name for it 'tis feeling all Name is but sound and smoke Shrouding
the glow of Heaven.
Such statements of belief were not rare in the Apologists; but Nature at this time was losing independent
importance in men's minds, like life itself, which after Cyprian was counted as nothing but a fight with the
devil.[14]
There is deep reverence for Nature in the lyrics, the hymns of the first centuries A.D., as a work of God and an
emblem of moral ideas. Ebert observes[15]
In comparison with the old Roman, one can easily see the peculiarities and perfect originality of these
Christian lyrics. I do not mean merely in that dominance of the soul life in which man appeared to be quite
merged, and which makes them such profound expressions of feeling; but in man's relationship to Nature,
which, one might say, supplies the colour to the painter's brush.[16] Nature appears here in the service of ideal
moral powers and robbed of her independence;[17] the servant of her Creator, whose direct command she
obeys. She is his instrument for man's welfare, and also at times, under the temporary mastery of the devil, for
his destruction. Thus Nature easily symbolizes the moral world.
CHAPTER II 21
'Bountiful Giver of light, through whose calm brightness, when the time of night is past and gone, the daylight
is suffused abroad, Thou, the world's true morning star, clearer than the full glorious sun, Thou very
dayspring, very light in all its fulness, that dost illumine the innermost recesses of the heart,' sings St Hilary in
his Morning Hymn; and in another hymn, declaring himself unworthy to lift his sinful eyes to the clear stars,
he urges all the creatures, and heaven, earth, sea and river, hill and wood, rose, lily, and star to weep with him
and lament the sinfulness of man.
In the Morning Hymn of St Ambrose dawn is used symbolically; dark night pales, the light of the world is
born again, and the new birth of the soul raises to new energy; Christ is called the true sun, the source of light;
'let modesty be as the dawn, faith as the noonday, let the mind know no twilight.'

ordering of Nature.
CHAPTER II 22
The cosmological element in theism has never been more beautifully expressed than in his words:
I asked the earth, and she said: 'I am not He,' and all things that are in her did confess the same. I asked the sea
and the depths and creeping things, and they answered: 'We are not thy God, seek higher.' I asked the blowing
breezes, and the whole expanse of air with its inhabitants made answer: 'Anaxagoras was at fault, I am not
God.' I asked the sky, the sun, the moon, the stars, and with a loud voice did they exclaim: 'He made us.' My
question was the enquiry of my spirit, their answer was the beauty of their form.
In another place:
Not with uncertain but with sure consciousness, Lord, I love Thee. But behold, sea and sky and all things in
them from all sides tell me that I must love Thee, nor do they cease to give all men this message, so that they
are without excuse. Sky and earth speak to the deaf Thy praises: when I love Thee, I love not beauty of form,
nor radiancy of light; but when I love my God, I love the light, the voice, the sweetness, the food, the embrace
of my innermost soul. That is what I love when I love my God.
Augustine's interest in Nature was thus religious. At the same time, the soothing influence of quiet woods was
not unknown to him.
The likeness and unlikeness between the Christian and heathen points of view are very clear in the
correspondence between Ausonius, the poet of the Moselle, and Paulinus, Bishop of Nola; and the deep
friendship expressed in it raises their dilettante verses to the level of true poetry.
Ausonius, thoroughly heathen as he was, carries us far forward into Christian-Germanic times by his
sentimentality and his artistic descriptions of the scenery of the Moselle.[22]
It is characteristic of the decline of heathendom, that the lack of original national material to serve as
inspiration, as the Æneas Saga had once served, led the best men of the time to muse on Nature, and describe
scenery and travels. Nothing in classic Roman poetry attests such an acute grasp of Nature's little secret
charms as the small poem about the sunny banks of the Moselle, vine-clad and crowned by villas, and
reflected in the crystal water below. It seemed as if the Roman, with the German climate, had imbibed the
German love of Nature; as if its scenery had bewitched him like the German maiden whom he compared to
roses and lilies in his song.
Many parts of his poetical epistles are in the same tone, and we learn incidentally from them that a lengthy
preamble about weather and place belonged to letter-writing even then.[23]

heathen, with sympathy and sentiment in addition.
Paulinus recognized the difference, and contrasted their ideas of solitude. 'They are not crazed, nor is it their
savage fierceness that makes men choose to live in lonely spots; rather, turning their eyes to the lofty stars,
they contemplate God, and set the leisure that is free from empty cares, to fathom the depths of truth they
love.'
In answer to his friend's praise of home, he praised Spain, in which he was living, and many copious
descriptions of time and place run through his other writings[24]; but while he yielded nothing to Ausonius in
the matter of friendship, 'sooner shall life disappear from my body than thy image from my heart,' he was
without his quiet musing delight in Nature. For her the heathen had the clearer eye and warmer heart; the
Christian bishop only acknowledged her existence in relation to his Creator, declaring with pride that no
power had been given to us over the elements, nor to them over us, and that not from the stars but from our
own hearts come the hindrances to virtue.
Lives of the saints and paraphrases of the story of creation were the principal themes of the Christian poets of
the fourth and fifth centuries. In some of these the hermit was extolled with a dash of Robinson Crusoe
romance, and the descriptions of natural phenomena in connection with Genesis often showed a feeling for the
beauty of Nature in poetic language. Dracontius drew a detailed picture of Paradise with much
self-satisfaction.
Then in flight the joyous feathered throng passed through the heavens, beating the air with sounding wings,
various notes do they pour forth in soothing harmony, and, methinks, together praise for that they were
accounted worthy to be created.[26]
For the charming legend of Paradise was to many Christian minds of this time what the long-lost bliss of
Elysium and the Golden Age had been to the Hellenic poets and the Roman elegist the theme of much vivid
imagery and highly-coloured word-painting.
Eternal spring softens the air, a healing flame floods the world with light, all the elements glow in healing
CHAPTER II 24
warmth; as the shades of night fade, day rises Then the feathered flocks fly joyfully through the air, beating
it with their wings in the rush of their passage, and with flattering satisfaction their voices are heard, and I
think they praise God that they were found worthy to be created; some shine in snowy white, some in purple,
some in saffron, some in yellow gold; others have white feathers round the eyes, while neck and breast are of
the bright tint of the hyacinth and upon the branches, the birds are moved to and fro with them by the wind.

My fountain, which, as it flows from the mountain-side, is overshadowed by a many-covered grotto with its
wide circle. It needs not Art; Nature has given it grace. That no artist's hand has touched it is its charm; it is no
masterpiece of skill, no hammer with resounding blow will adorn the rocks, nor marble fill up the place where
the tufa is worn away.
He lays stress upon the contrast between culture and Nature, town luxury and country solitude, in his second
letter to Domidius, and describes the beauties of his own modest estate with sentimental delight:
You reproach me for loitering in the country; I might complain with more reason that you stay in the town
when the earth shines in the light of spring, the ice is melting from the Alps, and the soil is marked by the dry
CHAPTER II 25